Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6b2c9d91554eb997…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

122.5 KB Created: 2022-02-09 09:48:26 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: fecababca5ccc521d917a9b4bf24900f SHA-1: 966e95ff822494cb39532229776fab7503b357cc SHA-256: 6b2c9d91554eb997d46cd7353e05938f06baef346d9cf5c6b9cd6d5d3f50e882
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample is a malicious Excel file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro that utilizes CreateObject to execute code. Heuristics indicate it functions as a URL dropper, reconstructing and attempting to download payloads from multiple embedded URLs. The ClamAV detection as 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet' strongly suggests the Emotet family, known for its downloader capabilities.

Heuristics 7

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (12 URLs) critical OLE_VBA_CELL_DROPPER_URL
    VBA reads worksheet cells, strips junk substrings via Replace(), and base64/UTF-16 decodes the result into a PowerShell EncodedCommand payload. The download URL is never contiguous in the file bytes; it was recovered by removing the macro's Replace() junk tokens from the cell strings and decoding the staged base64.
  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_Open macro
  • CreateObject call high OLE_VBA_CREATEOBJ
    CreateObject call
  • VBA p-code auto-exec with execution tokens high OLE_VBA_PCODE_AUTOEXEC_EXEC
    Compiled VBA/cache stream contains an auto-execution token together with shell/download/object-execution tokens. This catches p-code-only or source-extraction-failure macro documents where visible source is unavailable.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://midnightsilvercrafters.com/store/wBjNOUw/
    • http://tempral.com/NATE_05_22_2009/BI710N4cQ6R3/
    • https://redington.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/3JVuVx7QUM/
    • https://uhc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/0EqfdeznntlOpaIP2Qv/
    • https://servilogic.n
    • https://comezmuhendislik.com/ljfrmm/VTpHRFWoORAHnRQ3aQL/
    • http://webmail.glemedical.com/wp-content/J1M2xxodH/
    • http://toto.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/i826vbcVgRJ/
    • https://golfpia.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/oEicpDnEkk/
    • https://garyjharris.com/cgi-bin/0hH/
    • https://vietnam.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/PfSVQagusZy7AaMw/
    • https://vinculinc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/VlcOPPwgidWlXDJNs6/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
4fddf268ac3048c835c2d2c2109be73d3a8197bff3ed41ed4c656959f237aff6
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 52352 bytes